Hitting Your Straps And Saving Your Neck With Peak Design

In another of my weblog columns* I vowed to go out to every camera shop in Australia to look for a better strap than the one I got with my camera. I have sawed my neck half off with a heavy zoom lens and need something soothing while the glue dries on the vertebrae.

This may be a candidate. The Peak Design people started out a few years ago with innovative camera holders that let you park you equipment on a belt instead of a strap - though you could sometimes combine the two ideas by latching the things onto backpack straps. They still make these sorts of camera docks but have also branched out into more conventional straps. Or are they all that conventional...?

The Slide is the one we're testing out today. It is advertised as being able to be configured as a sling, neck or shoulder strap.

Basic structure is nylon webbing. Slick and smooth-edged - good so far. It runs from 95cm to 132cm so if I gain weight dramatically I can still fit in it.

The atttachment points are teflon cord, which is easy to slip into camera lugs. In addition, there is a plate mount so that you can put one cord on a lug and one on the underside of the camera where the tripod screw goes in. Makes for two more options in slinging the camera, and as the plate has the edge measurements of Arca Swiss plates, you can clamp it on Arca heads straight away.

The strap has a quick-adjustment lever that lets you slide it up and down with ease - while wearing it if you wish.

And the bit I love - the strap has a unique quick-disconnect lug set at each end of it to let you click it all off if you are using the camera in a studio on a tripod. No more dangling strap interfering with ball head or three-way head controls or falling over the eye sensor and shutting the darned LCD screen off! This alone would improve the language in the Little Studio by about 150%...

I still will look at every strap in Australia but this is a good contender.

* frontierandcolonial.wordpress.com